Tuesday, 19 July 2016

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Fourteen years ago, when Taylor Swift was just 12, a
woman named Whitney Houston asked for the receipts. It was a simple
request. Journalist Diane Sawyer had asked Houston to comment on an alleged $730,000 drug problem.

"I wanna see the receipts." Houston calmly replied,
daring Sawyer to come up with an itemized list of purchases from
Houston’s alleged dealer. She repeated: "I wanna see the receipts."

The logic: No matter how off Houston might have seemed at
the time, she wanted to see proof that she was consuming enough illegal
substances to pay for a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Sawyer could
not manifest that proof. And even if Houston was most likely not of
sound mind, no one had the receipts to pin her down.

On that glorious day, the concept of receipts — the
damning, smoking-gun evidence that something occurred — was created. It
wasn’t common to demand "receipts" yet, but it would be. Taylor Swift,
then 12, had no idea that Kim Kardashian would one day release the most
damning pop music receipts in recent memory: Taylor Swift lied about Kanye West, and there’s video to prove it.

Kim Kardashian released THE conversation between Kanye and Taylor Swift on Snapchat

On Sunday night, Kardashian posted a series of videos on
Snapchat in which West, her husband, was talking to Swift on the phone
about his song "Famous" — a song that Swift has labeled as offensive and derogatory.
Because Snapchat is a strange beast and everything on the social media
platform is temporary, here is a (hopefully more permanent) video of
what Kim posted, as recorded by a Kanye West fan Twitter account:

In it, you can hear West clearly talking to Swift about his song in a really polite voice. She’s pretty cordial too.

"I really appreciate you telling me about it. That’s really nice," she says. "It’s all very tongue-in-cheek either way."

If you’re just tuning in to the ongoing drama between
Swift, West, and Kardashian, the video looks like two friends chatting.
To unlock the full, swirling vortex of feuds you actually have to go all
the way back to the beginning of the year.

In February, Swift and West had a very public fight over lyrics he rapped in "Famous," then a new song. During West's fashion show/album drop live eventat Madison Square Garden, he dropped a verse about having sex with Swift someday, because he believes he made her famous:

I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex

Why? I made that bitch famous

God damn

I made that bitch famous

Swift took offense to this. In a statement to the press,
her team said the lyrics were inappropriate, noting, "Kanye did not
call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single 'Famous’ on
her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a
song with such a strong misogynistic message."

West responded with a series of Twitter posts saying that
Swift’s statement was bullshit and that he had specifically told Swift
about the lyrics prior to the song’s release. He added that he even got
approval from Swift, saying the lyric was her idea:

(Twitter)

The fight between the two became a he-said-she-said version of events that culminated in a Grammys speech wherein Swift famously shaded West, implying that he was trying to take credit for her success.

"As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the
Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there, there
will be people along the way who will try to undercut your success," she
said. "Or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame."

Essentially, this new video from Snapchat shows that
Swift is being inconsistent, or not telling the entire truth. This video
contradicts Swift and her publicist's claim that West didn’t call Swift
to get her approval of the "Famous" lyrics, and that she tried to talk
him out of releasing the song and the verse.

"If people ask me about it, I think it would be great for
me to be like, ‘Look, he called me and told me about the line,’" she
says in the recording — a sentence that’s so out of line with the public
feud we’ve been watching ever since, you'd think it would be made up.

Swift says the video only tells one side of the story

To be clear: The video that Kardashian posted is edited.
Due to the nature of Snapchat, which limits the length of continuous
video you can post, there are several jump cuts and stops and starts.
It’s possible that Kardashian could have simply omitted any portions
that were unfavorable to West. But for the most part it doesn’t appear
that Swift’s words are spliced together or edited in a misleading way —
the videos use her full sentences.

After Kardashian posted the recording to Snapchat on
Sunday, Swift posted a response on Instagram, explaining that though she
was cordial and encouraging when West called her to discuss the song,
West ultimately pulled a bait and switch on her:

(Instagram)

Swift’s story changes a bit. In that initial
denial, ​she​ made it sound like there was no conversation with West —
just a plea ​for her​ to release the song on Twitter. If you go by that
account, all the politeness that's seen ​in the video isn't supposed to
exist.

​But now that Kardashian made Swift and West’s
conversation public, Swift’s ​new story is that when she and West
talked, he didn’t tell her he was going to call her a "bitch." She says
he didn’t give her the full story on the phone. In the recording, she
and West discuss the line "I think me and Taylor might still have sex"
and West saying that he made Swift famous, but not the part where West
calls her "that bitch."

"While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone
call, you cannot ‘approve’ of a song you haven’t heard," Swift wrote on
Instagram on Sunday. "Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never
given the full story or played any part of the song is character
assassination."

This fight is really about Taylor Swift’s image

Taylor Swift and her success are a strange phenomenon.
Critics and her biggest fans will openly tell you that she doesn’t have
the best voice or the best technical skills. Her songwriting, while
impossibly catchy, isn’tmind-blowing or complex.

What she’s fantastic at is creating songs that
crystallize a messy, usually teenage feeling that somehow speaks to
everyone, even people who have never felt it, and weave it in with slips
of her personal life. The personal life part of that skill is crucial.

Every song she’s released throughout her career, every
post she’s shared on social media — it’s all helped paint a portrait of
Swift as your best friend. Her latest album, her tour, her Instagram
photos, and her Facebook posts are all wrapped around the fantasy of
being her pal and joining her coven of female friendship. With some pop
stars, you want to be them; with Taylor Swift, you just wanna hang out
with her.

Kardashian’s Snapchat video cuts through that veneer —
throwing doubt on what your BFF Taylor Swift is telling you, making you
wonder, well, if Taylor could lie about that conversation with West, what else could she be lying about?

The timing of this Snapchat is interesting too. Kardashian was featured in GQlast month, where she addressed Swift, West, and the song. She maintained that Swift knew about the song:

"She totally approved that," Kim says, shaking her head in annoyance.
"She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a
sudden act like she didn’t. I swear, my husband gets so much shit for
things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get
it approved." Kim is on a roll now, speaking faster and more animatedly
than at any other point during our time together. "What rapper would
call a girl that he was rapping a line about to get approval?"

And on Sunday’s episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians,
this interview was teased out. To be fair, Kardashian isn't just
releasing this video to clear her husband and her name — she (and her
team) knows how to market a video-fueled scandal.

Further, Swift’s ex, Calvin Harris, had some not-so-nice things
to say about Swift after it was revealed that she co-wrote one of his
songs. It was implied that Harris never gave her the credit.

"I know you're off tour and you need someone new to try
and bury like Katy [Perry, who was part of a feud with Swift and the
alleged subject of Swift’s song "Bad Blood"] but I'm not that guy,
sorry," Harris tweeted. "I won't allow it."

Harris paints Swift as cold and calculating. Her fights,
Harris suggests, aren’t organic, free-range fights that happen out of
nowhere. Instead, he implies they are actually planned out in advance,
as marketing stunts.

Swift’s celebrity hinges on the air of authenticity,
which means her feuds are supposed to be real. They’re supposed to be
genuine stories of her being wronged. They’re supposed to involve her
showing all of us that even our best friend can get angry, and that we
need to stick up for her.

And when it comes to Swift’s feuds, none of them compare to her ongoing feud with Kanye West.

Swift has, since that infamous Video Music Awards interruption in 2009,
cast Kanye as a bully to her innocence, a liar to her truth teller. At
the 2016 Grammys, she accused him of trying to take credit for her fame.
Now she’s been recorded not only being nice and cordial to him about
his song but also insinuating that it’d be good marketing for her and
Kanye.

"You guys wanna call this a feud, you wanna call this
throwing shade," she imagines herself saying to reporters and fans. "But
right after the song comes out I'm gonna be on a Grammy red carpet and
they're gonna ask me about it and I'm gonna be like, he called me."

Hearing Taylor Swift think out loud about how to spin the
story, to me, is more damaging than learning that Taylor Swift lied
about Kanye West. It’s very possible that she thought taking offense to
"Famous" would be better for her career than showing the public that she
and Kanye have patched things up. Harris’s Twitter outburst also makes
that point — that there’s no hard feelings, just a savvy album and
marketing strategy.

Kim Kardashian’s Snapchat video reveals a Taylor Swift
and Kanye West interaction that we didn’t know existed. But it also
confirms that underneath the thick coating of bubblegum pop known as
Taylor Swift, there’s a shrewd, savvy woman who puts a lot of effort
into shaping and maintaining her public image — a person who we sort of
knew existed but never really had the proof. Until now.